Never again.

Looking down at the essay in front of him, it was the only thing that Horace Slughorn could think. Never. Again.

Do they really think this is correct? he wondered morosely, summoning a new pot of red ink with a wave of his wand. It seemed that in the twenty-odd years since he had last taught at Hogwarts, he had managed to banish this bane of every teacher's existence to the darkest recesses of his mind.

He was glad for that miracle, of course – remembering this always hurt his head – but it also meant that being faced with it again came as a rather horrible shock to him. And it wasn't as though his current batch of students had even a halfway acceptable reason for the- mess, was the only fitting word he could think of, in front him. He had seen the Back to School advertisement campaign that Weasleys' Wizarding Wheezes had run in the Prophet – the students had more than enough options to make sure certain that he didn't need to be subjected to such torture.

It was all made worse by the fact that most of the essays weren't even that bad, at least when it came to the content. If they just paid a bit more attention, a lot of them had the potential to turn in clean, clear pieces of work.

Instead, he was stuck with this.

Sighing, he returned his attention to the essay in front of, starting the slow and tedious process of correcting all the errors. At the very least, this first set of essays had taught him a valuable lesson. There was no chance of him escaping correcting the essays of the older students, but thankfully, students fifth year and above weren't as bad with their work. As for the rest of them-

Well, he suspected that there were a few Ravenclaws who wouldn't mind proofreading essays in exchange for a little extra credit.

an: i remember it being pointed out somewhere that hogwarts or the wizarding world doesn't seem to have any sort of basic education structure - language, maths, the like. while the older students would have learned, i have this vivid image of the professors groaning the spelling in first year essays, especially those by students raised in the wizarding world.